Some more data - another google search result displayed the URI this way:

dadshouse.wordpress.com/?p=173

what do I have to do to get the permalink into search results? I would have figured wordpress.com would take care of that for me automatically. Is it because of my dadshouseblog.com redirect? What can I change to fix this?

Ok, now I get NO search traffic. WordPress did "maintenance" on my dashboard last night, and all my search traffic disappeared. What happened?

I have a real site. I wrote a serious article about Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair pics. This is a serious issue on the internet and in magazines today. I did not post anything that violates the guidelines. There is is no nudity on my site. I am not using photos wihtout permission. I clearly have rights displayed with hyperlinks to creative content licenses. There is nothing obscene posted on my site.

I have the words "nude" in my content because famed photographer Annie Leibovitz has for years taken tasteful nude photos of celebrities for Vanity Fair magazine, a national publication, and put them on the cover. She went too far with a recent shot of Miley Cyrus. It is a google trend - people all over are writing about. Huffington Post, Time magazine, CNN, etc. I did not display any obscene photos.

WordPress - what happened? Please account for yourself. Am I banned from all search? Is this post banned? Can you explain to me what you did to my account? If there's some fine point of the user agreement I violated, please explain that to me so I can make corrections. Else, please restore my account.

Just curious why you're assuming it's wordpress? An article doesn't usually get search hits everyday. It's based on what people are searching on the net, at any particular time. I have articles I've written months ago that will suddenly get surges in hits for inexplicable reasons. I have other articles which get no hits at all. To use your Cyrus example. That was a story which was all over the net. No offense, but don't you think huge blogs like TIME are gonna get more hits about that subject than yours?

I just searched your article and found it on the very first page. However it is not at the top of the page, cuz bigger blogs get more hits. People are fickle and may not scroll down to your article to click. But it is in search engines!

WordPress shut my dashboard down for an hour last night to do "maintenance", and when it was available to me again, the search traffic had stopped. I've been getting substantial traffic every hour for the past 4 days because I wrote about a topic that is hot on Google and Yahoo searches right now. All that search traffic stopped when WordPress did its maintenance. It's like someone turned the spiget off completely.

The really frustrating thing to me is that WordPress did not send me an email. I only know about the shutdown because I was online when they did their maintenance, and my dashboard was not available.

I don't expect to get anywhere near the traffic of those bigger sites like Time and CNN, but to go from a steady stream of search traffic to an immediate nothing points to whatever WordPress did to my account.

WordPress has no control over how a search engine provider indexes your blog (whether it points to actual article or just blog). And maybe the cyrus thing has taken its' course? Like people are now searching ryan reynold's engagement and Asian Cyclone? My point is that there are many explanations. Articles do have a "shelf life", you know?

But no one volunteering to help can get into the mind of wordpress staff. Perhaps sending them a support question when they open would be more useful than venting? What are we gonna be able to do for you other than state that there could be a million reasons as to why things appear as they do?

Thanks for your input. The fact that WordPress went down for a while should not keep my search engine traffic off now that WordPress is back up.

Miley Cyrus is still quite hot, according to Google trends. I know trends ebb and flow, but they don't stop in a flash. I was getting hits every single minute, now nothing in an instant.

I did send a note to support@wordpress.com. The contact info on the WordPress site says support is "closed" on the weekend. I'm posting here in hopes whoever at WordPress shut my search traffic off will read this and turn it back on. Someone at WordPress is working. Someone did changes to my site.

If it's a glitch, I'd like to hear if others lost substantial search traffic, and whether that traffic is back up.

Looks like someone turned the spiggot back on, my search-driven hits are flowing again. Maybe the 8-hour stop was due to the WP glitch. Maybe it was something they did to my site and fixed again. Maybe it was a slow Saturday night. I'll try to find out from support, and report back (probably tomorrow).

Meanwhile - anyone know why search engines are pointing at my blog address and not at the permalinks? Anyone else have this problem?